Why The Airbus A380 Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon

When Singapore Airlines revealed last week that it won’t renew the lease on its first Airbus A380—the double-decker behemoth the carrier helped launch nearly ten years ago—news quickly circulated that the plane’s days might be numbered.
“Airlines are abandoning the world’s largest passenger airplane” read one such headline. Several other major operators of the plane, like Qantas and Air France, were also said to be cooling on the jet’s prospects and delaying or cancelling orders.

But is the 550-passenger superjumbo—which debuted in 2007 with grand plans to reshape the way we fly—really headed for the airplane graveyard? Far from it, say industry analysts and a number of airline executives, who note that with the fleet already in the air, and new models still rolling—albeit more slowly—off the assembly line, the plane will be flying the skies for many years to come. In fact, there are 13 carriers flying nearly 200 of these planes, with another 126 scheduled for delivery over the next few years. And while that’s well behind Airbus’s admittedly bullish goal of building 1,200 of these jets, it’s in line with other industry forecasts that were made when the plane debuted.

Singapore, whose actions set off the latest round of speculation on the plane’s prospects, says it is taking delivery of five more A380s starting in 2017, minus the older ones it is retiring; it currently operates 19 A380s in several configurations. (One of the most popular with road warriors features a super-size, 86-flat-bed-seat business class cabin, which takes up the entire top deck.) Yet it's not surprising that the airline would choose to turn back the very first A380 it received: early models tend to have more problems and are less efficient, and improvements based on early performance show up in later editions.

Nevertheless, the plane was always going to be a tough sell to cost-conscious airline executives, with a list price of some $432.6 million and a girth that required costly airport renovations to accommodate what one aviation insider described as “this big monster” of a plane. (Airbus says that the plane current serves 54 airports, ranging from Atlanta and Amsterdam to Vancouver and Vienna.) Plus, due to its sheer size, it has four engines, while the trend in the industry has been toward smaller two-engine models, which consume less fuel and can be flown economically between many more cities, bypassing crowded hubs like London Heathrow and New York’s JFK.

“Airline accountants and route planners hate the A380, because it’s often ‘too much plane’ to fill for most airlines,” Henry Harteveldt, founder and travel industry analyst at Atmosphere Research in San Francisco, tells Condé Nast Traveler. “But passengers do seem to like the aircraft." Among the innovations it heralded, he noted, are that many airports now offer boarding via both decks, with as many as three loading bridges, which helps to speed up boarding and disembarkation.

Other customer-pleasing perks: The passenger cabin is “extremely quiet,” he says, a particular benefit to fliers on some of the ultra-long distance flights the plane operates, like Qantas’s marathon Sydney-Dallas route and and Dubai-San Francisco. It’s also wider, and delivers more space per passenger—many airlines configure it for fewer than 400 people, far less than what they could jam in (in an extreme layout, it could potentially carry 850 passengers). And, because the A380 is often a flagship plane for the airlines that have bought it, carriers have lavished lots of resources on the cabins.

Take Emirates, which is by far the plane’s biggest booster—it has 80 of the planes, with orders out for dozens more (the number of orders can be illusory, however, since airlines don’t necessarily follow through). After the Dubai-based line installed such over-the- top features as inflight showers for first class passengers and lavish “suites,” Etihad and Qatar have also used the plane to burnish their image for luxurious accommodations. Other major operators include Lufthansa, Korean, British Airways, Asiana, Thai, and China Southern; Malaysia Air has six of the jets, but recently said it’s looking to swap them for A350s. It’s notable that U.S. airlines stayed away from the plane, and from a financial standpoint, they might be congratulating themselves on their prescience—especially as Airbus itself is promoting the smaller and more fuel-efficient (and jet-lag ending?) A350 as the newest plane of the future.

Oddly, rather than being a plane whose time has come and gone, it may actually be way ahead of is time. The A380 “is in some ways 20 years too early,” Robert Stallard, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in Sydney, was recently quoted as saying, noting that with global airline traffic expected to continue growing at around four percent a year, at some point demand will catch up. Airbus, naturally, has latched on to the cult following for the plane: it claims that 60 percent of the estimated 130 million passengers who have flown on it have made "an extra effort" to do so. "This trend is building, resulting in our creation of a specific website (IflyA380.com) that helps passengers find the routes A380s fly and book their tickets, " a spokeswoman for the manufacturer tells Condé Nast Traveler.

Given all that, it's too soon for a swan song: The plane “will be viable for years to come, but only on a hub-to-hub basis, and that limits its appeal,” says Clive Irving, author of Wide-Body, a history of the 747, and a columnist for the The Daily Beast. “The two wide-bodies with a future are the Boeing 777X and the Airbus A350.”